Four Ways Preventative Maintenance Will Grow Your Bottom Line

You will have to spend money on equipment maintenance, but when you choose to spend that money could impact how much money you actually make. When it comes to equipment servicing, sooner or later you are going to be doing maintenance on your equipment.

Preventive maintenance is the act of performing maintenance on equipment with the goal of keeping your fleet running at its best year round. The key to preventive maintenance is routine inspection, detection, and correction of equipment failures before they occur or develop into larger defects.

1 Cost Savings

 You may not like the sound of being asked to spend money before you have to. Especially if you think of it as doing scheduled repairs on equipment that isn’t even broken. Well, the truth is that if it ain’t broke, doesn’t mean you can’t fix it.

I am of course working under the assumption that you will be running your business for more than a couple years and are concerned about the long term health of your business. So if you want to save money in the long run, understand that preventive maintenance;

• Extends an assets life expectancy, meaning they get more out of their original investment
• Increases efficiency of equipment, saving money on energy consumption
• Decreases downtime, increasing utilization of assets
• Maintains a better resale value on your equipment

2 Improved Safety

When equipment isn’t well maintained it becomes a dangerous variable on each job site it enters. Preventive maintenance allows you to deploy your fleet with confidence that the machines are in optimal working condition. Reducing the overall risk of equipment related accidents and injuries.   

Also, some insurance providers will require you to provide maintenance records of your equipment, and offer discounts to operators that take care of their equipment.

3 Enhanced Reputation

Rental shops enjoy plastering their equipment with customer stickers letting the world know who’s equipment is being used on that site. This can be great when everything is running smoothly, but having an entire job site looking at a broken down piece of equipment quickly sends the wrong message.

An investment in the reliability of a company’s equipment is also an investment in the reputation of their business. You have customers and they care about what those customers think of them. With preventive maintenance, you can boost your reputation as being a reliable company because your equipment will always be ready to perform. Decreasing the risk of your customers having to delay jobs due to equipment failure.

4 Offer Routine Maintenance Contracts for Recurring Service Revenue

If you sell equipment or work with companies that own their own equipment, preventive maintenance can be a new revenue stream for your business. Once you have a system in place to track preventive maintenance, adding additional assets to the schedule is easy.

By offering routine maintenance contracts to customers you can leverage preventive maintenance to become a recurring source of service revenue.

This also allows you to be paid to regularly visit your customers which helps to build your working relationship and can lead to more sales, rentals and service contracts in the future.

For example while on site performing an oil change, your tech may discover another part of the machine that is wearing out.  By suggesting they monitor this, or replace it now can be the difference between scheduled and emergency downtime for their fleet.